As the mobile communication technologies advance and people's living standards improve continuously, use of various mobile terminals such as mobile phones becomes increasingly widespread.
Communication operators generally have an absolute control over mobile phones they purchased, and usually adopt the SIMLock technology to restrict users from using SIM cards of other operators in the mobile phones. As its name implies, SIMLock is used to restrict use of some SIM cards in a mobile terminal. Such restriction is done depending on needs of the operators, and is intended to protect their own rights and constrain their competitors by inhibiting use of SIM cards of other operators in the mobile terminals they issue.
Although the dual-card-dual-standby and multi-card-multi-standby technologies have appeared, there still lacks a thorough understanding by the operators on how to effectively utilize such technologies. Currently, practices of controlling functions within a mobile phone are all based on the SIMLock specification of the standard 3GPP/3GPP2 (3rd Generation Partnership Project 2), and all resources of a mobile phone are treated uniformly: either all functions are allowed to be used by the user or only an emergency call can be made.
On the other hand, in the mobile communication market dominated by the operators, it is difficult for a user who desires to change from one operator to another to keep the original telephone numbers, and this represents great inconveniences for the user.
Accordingly, improvements and developments still have to be made in the prior art.